Obama’s Promise of No Abortion Funding in ObamaCare Just a “Magic” Trick

By Matthew Clark 1:44 PM Nov. 16, 2011

We knew, and now new information reveals that the White House knew, that President Obama’s Executive Order to prevent abortion funding in ObamaCare is a sham.

In order to gain enough votes to pass ObamaCare, President Obama made a “deal” with a group of supposedly “pro-life” Democrat Congressmen, led by then Congressman Bart Stupak.

The deal was simple, if the group of Congressmen would forego their concern that ObamaCare provided funding for abortions – which it does – and vote for the bill, President Obama would sign an Executive Order which he promised would “ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is now clear that the White House knew that this promise against abortion funding was a sham.

In an email exchange with then Solicitor General, now Justice, Elena Kagan, Lawrence Tribe, “senior counselor for access to justice” of the Department of Justice and liberal Harvard law professor, expressed his elation for ObamaCare’s passage and noted that the President’s Executive Order was nothing more than a sham.

Tribe stated, "And with the Stupak group accepting the magic of what amounts to a signing statement on steroids!"

He is exactly right. It was a “magic” trick, slight of hand, intended to fool the American people and Members of Congress into passing this pro-abortion bill.

Neither a signing statement – a written pronouncement by the President when he signs a bill into law – nor an Executive Order has the force of a congressionally enacted law.

As Jay Sekulow, ACLJ Chief Counsel, made crystal clear at the time President Obama proposed this Executive Order:

The Executive Order is problematic on a number of fronts. It is not a legislative fix and does not carry the force of Congressionally-approved legislation. It does not supersede law. It can be rescinded.

And, what should concern everyone: this Executive Order places HHS Secretary Sebelius at the helm of the funding process - a cabinet member who has a long and documented history of supporting abortion.

The fact is the American people won't be fooled. They understand what happened - another Washington power play that ignores what most Americans want.

That Executive Order does not stop ObamaCare from funding abortions because it does not have the effect of a congressionally enacted statute. It is, as Tribe said, nothing more than a “signing statement on steroids.”

Delaying the pipeline decision until after the election is a purely political stunt on Chairman Maobama's part:

WSJ wrote:

Obama Abandons (Private) Labor The Keystone decision is a signal to blue-collar workers that this is no longer their fathers' Democratic Party. By DANIEL HENNINGER

The decision by the Obama administration to "delay" building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn't hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

The Keystone XL pipeline would have created at least 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Much of this would have been well-paid work for craftsmen, not jobs as hod carriers to repave the Interstate.

On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., Mr. Obama signaled where his head was on the pipeline during a TV interview: "Folks in Nebraska, like folks all across the country, aren't going to say to themselves, 'We're going to take a few thousand jobs if it means our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health." Imagine if he'd been leading a wagon train of workers and farmers across the Western frontier in 1850.

Within days of the Keystone decision, Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, said his country would divert sales of the Keystone-intended oil to Asia. Translation: Those lost American blue-collar pipeline jobs are disappearing into the Asian sun. Incidentally, Mr. Harper has said he wants to turn Canada into an energy "superpower," exploiting its oil, gas and hydroelectric resources. Meanwhile, the American president shores up his environmental base in Hollywood and on campus. Perhaps our blue-collar work force should consider emigrating to Canada.

Recall as well the president's gut reaction in 2010 to the BP Gulf oil spill: an order shutting down deep-water drilling in U.S. waters. The effect on blue-collar workers in that industry was devastating. Writing in these pages this week, Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski described how Mexico, the Russians, Canada and even Cuba are moving to exploit oil and gas deposits adjacent to ours, while the Obama administration slow-walks new drilling permits.

No subject sits more centrally in the American political debate than the economic plight of the middle class. Presumably that means people making between $50,000 and $175,000 a year. The president fashions himself their champion.

This surely is bunk. Mr. Obama is the champion of the public-sector middle class. Just as private business has become an abstraction to the new class of public-sector Democratic politicians and academics who populate the Obama administration, so too the blue-collar workers employed by them have become similarly abstracted.

You would think someone in the private labor movement would wake up and smell the tar sands. Last week's Big Labor "victory" in Ohio was about spending tens of millions to support state and local government workers. Many union families attached to the state's withering auto plants no doubt voted with their public-sector brothers in solidarity. But why? Where the rubber hits the road—new jobs that will last a generation—what does this public-sector vote do for them?

Many farmers, ranchers and timber workers went Republican years ago over an increasingly ideological and uncompromising Democratic environmentalism that was wrecking their livelihoods. Now the same thing is happening to blue-collar workers. Mr. Obama from his first days made clear his hostility to carbon production. At best he views much of the private blue-collar work force as carbon enablers for whom he himself will create a new harmony of "green" industries. That would be Solyndra.

Solyndra isn't just a fiasco. It's a clear warning that launching new industries onto the big muddy of massive public subsidies is fraught with economic and political problems.

The Democratic promise to private blue-collar workers has been that the party would use its clout to in effect "manufacture" new jobs out of public budgets—high-speed rail projects, school construction and the like. But surely that's gone aglimmering.

Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, New York and California—whose blue-collar families traditionally hand those states to Democratic candidates—are all locked in budgetary death struggles to pay for their public workers. That conversation is about generations-long budget commitments. There isn't going to be anything large left over for "public-private" job schemes.

There's little hope that anyone in the leadership of the traditional union movement, public or private, would entertain a rethinking of their historic ties to the Democratic Party. But younger workers should. The economic crisis of the past two years is no blip. In some construction unions, unemployment is well over 25%. The only force out there that can create real jobs over the longer term is the strongest private economic growth the U.S. can muster. The past three years of a Democratic administration's economic policies have the U.S. mired in a growth rate rotating like a forgotten flywheel around 2%.

America's workers, no matter the color of their collars, desperately need a higher economic growth rate than decisions such as the delay on Keystone are going to give them. The Keystone shuffle should make clear to many middle-class workers that this is no longer their fathers' Democratic Party. It's going in a different direction, toward the clouds. This may be the year to open negotiations with the alternative.

The Obama administration pressured analysts to change an environmental review to reflect fewer job losses from a proposed regulation, the contractors who worked on the review testified Friday.

The dispute revolves around proposed changes to a rule regulating coal mining near streams and other waterways. The experts contracted to analyze the impact of the rule initially found that it would cost 7,000 coal jobs.

But the contractors claim they were subsequently pressured to not only keep the findings under wraps but "revisit" the study in order to show less of an impact on jobs.

Steve Gardner, president of Kentucky consulting firm ECSI, claimed that after the project team refused to "soften" the numbers, the firms working on the study were told the contract would not be renewed. ECSI was a subcontractor on the project.

The government "'suggested' that the ... members revisit the production impacts and associated job loss numbers, with different assumptions that obviously would then lead to a lesser impact," Gardner testified before a House Natural Resources subcommittee."The ... team unanimously refused to use a 'fabricated' baseline scenario to soften the production loss numbers."

The charges escalate a dispute over environmental regulations that has been brewing for months, as the Obama administration tries to overhaul mining rules that were put in place at the end of the George W. Bush administration following a years-long review.

The prediction that the changes would cost 7,000 jobs was first made public in January of this year. As officials in the affected states cried foul, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement defended its proposed re-write.

Joseph Pizarchik, director of that office, went further in a hearing earlier this month and said the job-loss stats were "fabricated based on placeholder numbers and have no basis in fact."

He said the numbers were "based on no evidence."

But on Friday, the subcontractors pushed back.

Gardner rejected Pizarchik's claim, and said in written testimony that the office asked the team to re-do its study when it "did not like the result of the analysis."

Johnson said he will "demand accountability" as he looks into what happened during the review.

The discrepancy in the numbers centered on what the consultants were comparing the new rule against.

According to Gardner, the Obama administration wanted them to assume the Bush-era 2008 mining regulation was in effect across the country -- though it is not and has been challenged in court. Gardner's firm did not want to do that but noted that using that assumption would show "less job loss impact."

While the mining industry has expressed concern about the economic impact of the regulation overhaul, the administration claims it is trying to address serious environmental issues that were unresolved in the last review.

Pizarchik, in his submitted testimony earlier this month, said the 2008 rule did not "fully" explore mining's impact on aquatic ecosystems. He said the government's goal is to protect drinking water, wildlife and scenery.

As officials debate the impact of proposed national mining regulations, another environmental decision in Ohio could put more jobs at stake. Earlier this week, the U.S. Forest Service withdrew plans to sell drilling rights on a national forest in Ohio so experts could study the impact of a drilling process known as fracking.

President Obama's cheerleaders are starting to peel away along with his approval ratings, and it's a fascinating sight to behold. They offer different reasons, but they all boil down to one obvious thing -- Obama is first and foremost about Obama -- and one less obvious: He has been a failed president.

Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, admittedly more centrist than most of their Democratic counterparts, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal urging Obama "to abandon his candidacy for re-election." The authors conclude that the only way Obama could possibly win in 2012 would be "to wage the most negative campaign in history," because he has no successful record to run on. If he would happen to win in that way, he wouldn't be able to govern, they say, so he should step aside and allow Hillary Clinton to run.

Their main beef with Obama seems to be his extreme partisanship, which is a particularly damning indictment coming from fellow Democrats. Should he resign, they argue, he would be in a better position to work with Republicans toward "a more constructive dialogue about our nation's future" instead of obsessing over whether he or George W. Bush is more to blame for our problems.

I don't agree that Obama would be any easier to work with if he were to withdraw from the race, but it is significant that two credible Democrats, both still loyal to their party, concede that Obama is hyper-partisan and hopelessly mired in the quicksand of scapegoating his predecessor.

Even more interesting was the viral video of Chris Matthews explaining to fellow MSNBC host Alex Witt why his Obama-thrill is gone. This represents quite a fall from Matthews' previous perch of Obama hero worship.

Matthews clearly believes that Obama peaked about the time his campaign ended and his term in office began, because "the day he was inaugurated, with the Mall filled with people, African-Americans and everyone else, he sent us all home and said, 'Thank you. Now watch how smart I am.' That's the worst kind of a notion of the presidency."

Matthews is also upset that Obama is running a "virtual presidency," through endless impersonal emails, rather than building and exploiting the interpersonal relationships that are vital for effective governance. On that score, he laments: "I hear stories (from members of Congress) that you will not believe. Not a single phone call since the last election."

Matthews is an incorrigible idealist, with a romanticized notion of politics, longing to relive his childhood conception of statecraft as a Camelot Neverland. He is livid at Obama for giving him a political fix with all that grandiose "Yes, we can" rhetoric and then removing it like a sadistic parole officer as soon as he was inaugurated.

Matthews wants a leader, not just to provide that fix but also to follow it up with a vision and policies to realize the vision. But here's what's revealing: Matthews excoriates Obama for failing to say "one thing about what he'd do in the second term. He never tells" us his plan for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the tax system or the long-term debt.

I think Matthews is disillusioned with Obama on two levels. First, he feels betrayed that Obama the person is so different from Obama the pseudo-messiah he calculatingly portrayed himself to be during the campaign. He's ultimately about himself; he's all hat and no cattle -- something many of us knew years ago. He doesn't share Matthews' idealism about politics, and he is an abject fraud for pretending to.

Second, whether or not he fully realizes it or its implications, Matthews is frustrated that Obama, the apparently quintessential liberal, hasn't been able, through their shared ideology, to produce prosperity and world peace.

There is a disconnect at work here with Matthews' anger at Obama for doing precisely what liberals do. Obama shoved through a radically liberal agenda -- the kind that should earn him permanent gratitude from a liberal such as Matthews, and it has led to economic catastrophe. Matthews, at least in part, is furious at Obama, perhaps subconsciously, for proving that Matthews' lifelong ideology is an epic fail.

But in fairness, Matthews is also rightly disgusted with Obama for refusing to provide leadership or show even a modicum of willingness to work in good faith to extricate us from these horrendous economic, entitlement and debt problems, which, maddeningly, are occurring on a liberal president's watch.

Matthews pleads: "Just tell us, Commander. Give us our orders, and tell us where we're going. Give us the mission. And he hasn't done it."

Does Obama Know the Difference between Great Britain and England?Nile GardinerNovember 29, 2011 at 7:09 pm

It is gratifying to see President Barack Obama condemn the disgraceful storming of the British Embassy in Tehran by thugs acting at the behest of the Iranian regime. After all, Obama has been notoriously slow in the past to criticise the brutal actions of the Iranian government after initially extending the hand of friendship to it. But did he really need to make another embarrassing foreign policy gaffe while doing so?

In a press conference this evening, the president referred in stumbling fashion to the “English Embassy” in Iran instead of the British Embassy. One can only imagine the kind of howls of derision that would greet any presidential contender if that kind of basic error were made before, say, the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can watch the video above.

In case the president is unaware, England forms part of Great Britain, which also includes Scotland and Wales, though not Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. There is no such thing as an “English” embassy anywhere in the world, and there hasn’t been one for several centuries.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this latest slip-up by President Obama. After all he recently described France as America’s closest ally, and famously declared that he has traveled to no less than 57 states. But it would be nice if the leader of the free world bothered to look at a map once in a while, or even paid a visit to the British Embassy in Washington, currently housing the Churchill bust that Mr. Obama unceremoniously threw out of the Oval Office soon after his inauguration.

Obama’s latest gaffe also raises questions about his overall approach to the Special Relationship. This has been a presidency that has significantly downgraded traditional US alliances, from Britain and Israel to eastern and central Europe, while appeasing brutal enemies like Iran as well as strategic adversaries such as Russia. All too often, Washington’s allies have been taken for granted, and even undermined. As a senior State Department official put it in 2009, in the eyes of the current administration: “there’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

From siding with Argentina on its call for UN-brokered negotiations over the sovereignty of the Falklands, to placing “a boot on the throat” of BP, Britain’s largest company, the Obama administration has downgraded relations with America’s closest friend and partner on the world stage. The Special Relationship still matters greatly on several key fronts for the United States, from the NATO-led operation in Afghanistan to the global war against Islamist terrorism. US-British military and intelligence cooperation remains vital to the defense of the free world, and cooperation between London and Washington will be imperative in standing up to an increasingly aggressive Iran. The White House will no doubt dismiss this latest faux pas by the president as a slip of the tongue, but it cannot disguise the fact that it has on many occasions treated Britain and other key allies with an air of disdain, and even contempt.

And to think that Attorney General Eric Holder is getting testy about congressional calls for his resignation. After all, the Justice Department has nothing to hide, right?:

The Obama Administration has abruptly sealed court records containing alarming details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered a U.S. Border patrol agent with a gun connected to a failed federal experiment that allowed firearms to be smuggled into Mexico.

This means information will now be kept from the public as well as the media. Could this be a cover-up on the part of the “most transparent” administration in history? After all, the rifle used to kill the federal agent (Brian Terry) last December in Arizona’s Peck Canyon was part of the now infamous Operation Fast and Furious. Conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the disastrous scheme allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.

The murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent is related to a Justice Department willingly turning over thousands of guns to Mexican criminal gangs, and Obama administration is hiding information about his death from the public. Amazing.

For most of his time as a national political figure, Barack Obama has been careful to cloak his core socialist leanings behind a veil of pro-capitalist rhetoric. This makes strategic sense, as Americans still largely identify as pro-capitalist. However, based on his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the President appears to have reassessed the political landscape in advance of the 2012 elections. Based on the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent defeat of Republicans in special elections, he has perhaps sensed a surge of left-leaning sentiment; and, as a result, he finally dropped the pretense.

According to our President's new view of history, capitalism is a theory that has "never worked." He argues that its appeal can't be justified by results, but its popularity is based on Americans' preference for an economic ideology that "fits well on a bumper sticker." He feels that capitalism speaks to the flaws in the American DNA, those deeply rooted creation myths that elevate the achievements of individuals and cast unwarranted skepticism on the benefits of government. He argues that this pre-disposition has been exploited by the rich to popularize policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.

But Obama's knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter. And his selection of the same location that Teddy Roosevelt used to chart an abrupt departure into populist politics is deeply symbolic in the opposite way to that which he intended. It is not by some genetic fluke that Americans distrust government. It is an integral and essential part of our heritage. The United States was founded by people who distrusted government intensely and was subsequently settled, over successive generations, by people fleeing the ravages of government oppression. These Americans relied on capitalism to quickly build the greatest economic power the world had ever seen - from nothing.

But according to Obama's revisionist version of American history, we tried capitalism only briefly during our history. First, during the Robber Barron period of the late 19th Century, the result of which was child labor and unprecedented lower-class poverty. These ravages were supposedly only corrected by the progressive policies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. We tried capitalism again in the 1920s, according to Obama, and the result was the Great Depression. This time, it allegedly took FDR's New Deal to finally slay that capitalist monster. Then, the account only gets more farcical. Apparently, we tried capitalism again under George W. Bush, and the result was the housing bubble, financial crisis, and ensuing Great Recession. Obama now argues that government is needed once again to save the day.

This view is complete fiction and proves that Obama is not qualified to teach elementary school civics, let alone serve as President of the United States. I wonder what other economic system he believes we followed prior to the 1890s and 1920s (and during the 1950s and 1960s) that that he now seeks to restore? Capitalism did not start with J.P. Morgan in 1890s or John D. Rockefeller in the 1920s as the President suggests. In fact, it was about that time that capitalism came under attack by the progressives. We were born and prospered under capitalism. The Great Depression did not result from unbridled capitalism, but from the monetary policy of the newly created Federal Reserve and the interventionist economic policies of both Hoover and Roosevelt - policies that were decidedly un-capitalist.

The prosperity enjoyed during mid-20th century actually resulted from the incredible progress produced by years of capitalism. Contrary to Obama's belief, the New Deal and Great Society did not create the middle class; it was, in fact, a direct result of the capitalist industrial revolution. The socialist programs of which Obama is so fond are the reasons why the middle class has been shrinking. America's economic descent began in the 1960s, when we abandoned capitalism in favor of a mixed economy. By mixing capitalism with socialism, we undermined economic growth, and reversed much of the progress years of laissez-faire had bestowed on average Americans. The back of the middle class is being broken by the weight of government and the enormous burden taxes and regulation place on the economy.

America's first experiment with socialism, the Plymouth Bay Colony, ended in failure, and our most successful colonies - New York, Virginia, Massachusetts - were begun primarily as commercial enterprises. When the founding fathers gathered to write the Constitution, they represented capitalist states and granted the federal government severely limited powers.

Apparently, Obama thinks our founders' mistrust of government was delusional, and that we were fortunate that far wiser groups of leaders eventually corrected those mistakes. The danger, as Obama sees it, is that some Republicans actually want to reverse course and adopt the failed ideas espoused by great American fools like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.

The President unknowingly illustrated his own contradictory thinking with the importance he now places on extending the temporary payroll tax cuts. If all that stands between middle-class families and abject poverty is a small tax cut, imagine how much damage the far more massive existing tax burden already inflicts on those very households! If Obama really wants to relieve middle-class taxpayers of this burden, he needs to reduce the cost of government by cutting spending. After all, there is no way to pay for all the government programs Obama wants by simply by taxing the rich.

History has proven time-and-again that capitalism works and socialism does not. Taking money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor does not grow the economy. On the contrary, it reduces the incentives of both parties. It lowers savings, destroys capital, limits economic growth, and lowers living standards. Maybe Obama should take his eyes off the teleprompter long enough to read some American history. In fact, he could start by reading the Constitution that he swore an oath to uphold.

When President Downgrade said that the free market doesn't work and has never worked, I about lost my mind. But of course, the lamestream media refuses to ask him what he would replace the free market with. Everybody that isn't a brain dead zombie knows that it's the system whose name should not be spoken though. I hate this idiot more and more with each passing day.

Ecofanaticism: SolyndraGate was no isolated case of corrupt government misspending. The U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon.

The massive Obama stimulus was supposed to generate millions of jobs, but the $535 million loan guarantee it gave to solar panel maker Solyndra on the eve of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy illustrated the fundamental incompetence of Obama's neo-Keynesian economic ideology.

Now we find the Navy partnering with the Agriculture Department to purchase hundreds of thousands of gallons of alternative biofuel in place of standard JP-5 fuel for Navy aircraft — the biggest federal purchase of biofuel ever.

It's part of the White House's "we can't wait for Congress" strategy as the 2012 election year looms. But JP-5 typically costs less than $4 a gallon. If a family on a budget started filling up with $16-a-gallon gas, it might want to adopt the motto, "we can't wait to go broke."

A look at the lucky seller of this environmentalist version of the proverbial $600 Pentagon toilet seat indicates that the move is not just wasteful, but ethically suspect.

As J.E. Dyer noted over the weekend on the Hot Air Green Room, "a member of Obama's presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a 'strategic advisor' at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy. Glauthier worked — shock, shock — on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill."

Solazyme had already gotten a nearly $22 million chunk of change out of the taxpayers thanks to the 2009 stimulus. We heard the ludicrous excuse last week from Obama Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, as quoted in the National Journal, that "we are doing this for one simple reason: It makes us better fighters" because "our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy ability to protect America and project power overseas."

What about the "very real threat" to the Navy of not having enough money for the ships, fighters and ammunition it needs to protect America? President Obama's assault on the Pentagon could scrap 60 of the Navy's ships, including two carrier groups.

Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast The biofuel will be used next summer by — we're not making this up — "the Great Green Fleet Carrier Strike Force" in exercises near Hawaii. Mabus painted the picture of America's great naval force advancing from sails to coal to diesel to nuclear, and now finally to biofuels. But if we keep starving the Navy, it may soon not have enough loose change to repair the sails on Old Ironsides.

And this is only the beginning of this two-for-one bad deal — swindling taxpayers while ravaging national security. Obama's Agriculture and Energy departments and Navy plan to spend $510 million over three years buying biofuel for military and commercial purposes, bypassing Congress by "leveraging Defense Department procurement."

"Green Fleet" is another of Obama's "borrowings" from Teddy Roosevelt, whose 1907-09 Great White Fleet — so called because the armada's ships were painted white — circumnavigated the globe to enforce treaties, protect U.S. possessions and show the world that America had become a superpower.

But Obama's jolly green Navy is a lot more PR than TR. So much so that at a conference last year, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead found himself publicly insisting that the Green Fleet was not a "public relations gimmick," claiming that "it's more than simply 'how green can we be seen?'"

Meaner, not greener, is what the U.S. Navy should be getting. Spending four times as much for biofuels may impress the Democratic Party's environmentalist special interests. But to Russia's Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other U.S. adversaries, it will be a sign of weakness and an invitation for aggression.

The amount of corruption in this administration makes Nixon look like a saint. And I'm afraid that what we know so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Someone doesn't rise up through Chicago politics without being exposed to and embracing rampant corruption. It's the Chicago way.

Just a few examples of how an overbearing government is intruding upon our freedoms, choices, and rights:

American Thinker wrote:

How's That Government Meddling Workin' Out for Ya'?By Richard N. Weltz

Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union an agricultural commissar from the Ukraine was summoned to the Agricultural Ministry in Moscow to report on the year's potato crop. "Ah, Comrade Minister," said the commissar, beaming, "If all the potatoes harvested this year were put into a single pile, it would reach to the feet of God."

"What!" exclaimed the minister, "you know that in Communism there is no God."

"Also," sighed the commissar, "in the Ukraine is no potatoes."

There was more truth than fiction to this old saw; and we remember the "good old days" of the USSR with complete government rule over production, 5-year plan after 5-year plan, and nothing but empty shelves, long lines just to buy bread, and tinny little cars for the few who could buy even that.

And we congratulated ourselves that in the good old U S of A, we were smart enough to allow market forces to bring abundance and luxury into every grocery, department store, or auto showroom. Shortages, certainly, were little known with respect to anything Americans needed or wanted. That may not be so true a whole lot longer, if Obama and his leftist-thinking ideologues continue to have their way.

Consider the following:

● Drugs needed to treat for ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) are in seriously short supply, as reported by the New York Times. It seems that the DEA worries that too much production might lead to theft, so it sets quotas on how much of the relevant drugs the pharmaceutical industry may produce each year. In its bureaucratic wisdom, this has caused severe shortages of the drugs for people, especially children, who badly need them.

● There's no shortage, however, of alternative-fueled cars; there's a glut thanks to government meddling. The recent automobile show in Detroit displayed a panoply of plug-in and hybrid vehicles that few, if any, buyers want. Reported Nick Bunkley:

Automakers are flooding the Detroit auto show with new hybrid and plug-in models, but the combination of gas prices below $4 a gallon and higher upfront costs for the cars is not attracting consumers.

Regardless, the automakers have little choice but to develop and try to push more hybrids as they prepare for fuel-efficiency requirements that call for significant increases later this decade.

● But there is a huge shortage of a mandated fuel additive. The feds may be levying up to $6.8 million in fines on oil companies who fail to blend into their gasoline and diesel fuels cellulosic biofuel, which is not available commercially, but which government planners demand refiners to blend in.

● On the other hand, the DoT's "Cash for Clunkers" program did create a shortage of affordable used cars because the rules set up by the planners mandated that, while the cars turned in had to be in drivable condition, they could not be resold on the secondhand market, but had to be completely scrapped. Unintended consequences of government meddling struck again.

● Incandescent light bulbs aren't in such short supply yet - but they soon will be. In its infinite wisdom, Congress decided to set standards for light bulbs that could not be met by the kinds based on the original Edison design and still widely in use throughout the nation. Beginning January 2012, the 100-watt size was to be effectively banned, to be followed in subsequent years by bulbs of other wattages.

Yes, a last-minute bit of legislation withholds funding for enforcement of the ban; but it's too late to do any good. Manufacturers have already shut down production and moved jobs offshore to Asia, where the expensive substitute CFLs are made. Says ABC News:

But what many Republicans are celebrating as a win for individuals' light-bulb-choosing freedom will probably not save the energy-guzzling bulbs from disappearing off store shelves.

"The industry has moved on," said Larry Lauck, a spokesman for the American Lighting Association.

Lauck said U.S. light bulb manufacturers have already "retooled" their production lines to build more efficient bulbs, he said.

● Sometimes bureaucratic interference doesn't create an actual shortage of something but simply drives its price sky high over what once were free-market levels. Take the recent case of colchicine, as explained by Slate.com:

A drug called colchicine is all that keeps some 2 million American gout patients from suffering debilitating pain in their toes, elbows, wrists, and fingers. Doctors have prescribed the compound, derived from the seeds of the autumn crocus, for centuries.

But patients who take colchicine woke up with a new symptom recently: a giant pain in the wallet. Until January, colchicine was sold by many companies and cost as little as 10 cents a pill. Now it's available only under the trade name Colcrys, sold by a Philadelphia company called URL Pharma -- for five dollars per pill.

It seems that, although the drug was originally approved in 1974 and had no history of problems, somebody (you get three guesses who) with access to political ears persuaded the FDA to revoke all licenses for its manufacture and require producers to go anew through an approval and licensing procedure. At the normal market price of a dime a pill, it's small wonder that only one company bothered to do so and now can charge any price it pleases.

● These are, of course, only a few examples of the egregious way in which the government began in January 2009 to control ever more of the American economy - banking, finance, autos, energy production, and whatever else some élitist types believed they know better how to do than Americans can do for themselves in a free market economy.

● The Obama DOJ even tried to take away a church or synagogue's right to hire and fire its own spiritual leaders and religious teachers -- stopped only by the unanimous Supreme Court decision earlier this week "exempting" religious organizations from the burden of the pervasive employment rules that govern secular enterprises.

● Speaking of employment, though, PepsiCo's largest bottling unit is being forced by the EEOC to pay a whopping $3 million-plus fine and offer jobs and training to blacks, against whom the government says Pepsi discriminated by choosing not to hire applicants who didn't pass the company's criminal background check.

Shortages, pricing screw-ups, unintended adverse consequences, micromanagement of citizens' private lives - the Soviets did all that; the Chinese as well; and the North Koreans and Cubans are still at it, all to ill effect. Never before in our nation's history have we moved so quickly and so unthinkingly down this dangerous path. Look around, and keep this in mind when you cast your votes in 2012.

For those of us not typically in the public eye, it is easy to forget the importance of good optics and public relations for someone who is. For those who routinely forget, however, there arises, once in a while, a perfect reminder of why they exist in the form of a delightfully bad PR move by someone who really cannot afford it at the moment. Today’s PR miss comes from the Obama campaign, whose candidate is shutting down “Main Street USA” to give a speech–the “neighborhood” Main Street USA in Disney World, that is.

The substance of this story is not particularly exciting: President Obama will visit Orlando, Florida tomorrow– where many theme parks call home– to talk about the economy and boosting tourism to the region and generally across the country. The President has begun a series of executive actions to help the economy under the title “We Can’t Wait.” It is the process by which the President will undertake this mission on his itinerary that appears tailor-made for punchlines.

Gawker’s Jim Newell points out how it reads once on paper, via the News 13 report on the matter:

Disney says the president will be at the Magic Kingdom, which means guests can plan for heavy security. Main Street USA will be closed for the duration of the president’s time there. Guests will be re-routed to other parts of the park. Disney is also cancelling extra magic hours for the Magic Kingdom, and pushing back the “Celebrate a Dream Come True” parade.

They really couldn’t find any other land in Disney World to do this in, like Fantasyland, or maybe Adventureland? On the other hand, at least they avoided shutting down Liberty Square.

There is so much wrong with this, it's ridiculous. First of all, why spend taxpayer dollars to travel down to Florida for a photo op to announce a tourism policy that could have been done at the White House? For those that don't know, it costs $181,000 per hour to operate Air Force One. Furthermore, from there, he flew to New York City to hold not one, not two, not three, but four fundraisers. I could think of several better uses for taxpayer funds.

Secondly, this just shows that 0bama doesn't give a crap about families who spent thousands of dollars for a vacation to Disney World. His Photo Op meant more to him than the children who were restricted from visiting the Magic Kingdom during the self-deluded King's appearance. His arrogance knows no bounds.

On the lighter side, being surrounded by Mickey Mouse and Goofy really isn't that much different than the typical 0bama cabinet meeting, so he probably felt right at home.

Those who contribute to, vote for, or otherwise support today's Democrat party need to catch up to the curve. These are not your father's Democrats. George McGovern would be a moderate in this party.

This is the party that rejected Hillary Clinton because she was not left enough. Instead it literally took a Marxist street agitator from the Chicago political machine and put him in the White House. Barack Obama was actually teaching the social manipulation methods of openly communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky to other Marxist revolutionaries for the radical communist front group ACORN. His weird name reflects his personal rejection of American culture. This is the person today's Democrat party wanted for President.

But it is not just him. The leader of the House Democrats is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ultraleft San Francisco Democrat totem. She is virtually as far left as Obama, and her public statements make Sarah Palin seem like a Ph.D. in economics. She keeps telling us that unemployment insurance payments are the best way to restore booming economic growth and prosperity.

When the American people rebuked Pelosi's ultraleft leadership as House Speaker, turning to the Republicans for the greatest House turnover since the New Deal, House Democrats responded with their own rebuke of the people. They voted Pelosi right back in as their leader, effectively saying to the American people that they were too stupid to know what they are doing, and that Pelosi's ultraleft San Francisco values best represent the Democrat party's ideals.

The Democrats also elected as DNC Chairman the unreasoned and far left screamer and name caller Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also makes Sarah Palin look like a rocket scientist. She touts as her achievements in the Florida legislature the Florida Residential Swimming Pools Safety Act, and state regulation of dry cleaning prices. She compiled during her career there the widely noted most liberal-left voting record of any state legislator. The Democrat party considered that the perfect qualification for party chairman.

If you think that increased government spending, deficits, and debt are the key to economic growth and prosperity, then this is the party for you. That is explicitly its economic policy, as crazy as that sounds. Democrats call it Keynesian economics. If you don't agree that increased government spending, deficits, and debt promote economic growth, then you shouldn't be voting for, contributing to, and supporting Democrats, and you shouldn't let your friends do so either.

How embarrassing this must be for President Obama, whose major speech theme so far this campaign season has been that every single American, no matter how rich, should pay their "fair share" of taxes.

Because how unfair -- indeed, un-American -- it is for an office worker like, say, Warren Buffet's secretary to dutifully pay her taxes, while some well-to-do people with better educations and higher incomes end up paying a much smaller tax rate.

Or, worse, skipping their taxes altogether.

A new report just out from the Internal Revenue Service reveals that 36 of President Obama's executive office staff owe the country $833,970 in back taxes. These people working for Mr. Fair Share apparently haven't paid any share, let alone their fair share.

Previous reports have shown how well-paid Obama's White House staff is, with 457 aides pulling down more than $37 million last year. That's up seven workers and nearly $4 million from the Bush administration's last year.

Nearly one-third of Obama's aides make more than $100,000 with 21 being paid the top White House salary of $172,200, each.

The IRS' 2010 delinquent tax revelations come as part of a required annual agency report on federal employees' tax compliance. Turns out, an awful lot of folks being paid by taxpayers are not paying their own income taxes.

The report finds that thousands of federal employees owe the country more than $3.4 billion in back taxes. That's up 3% in the past year.

That scale of delinquency could annoy voters, hard-pressed by their own costs, fears and stubbornly high unemployment despite Joe Biden's many promises.

The tax offenders include employees of the U.S. Senate who help write the laws imposed on everyone else. They owe $2.1 million. Workers in the House of Representatives owe $8.5 million, Department of Education employees owe $4.3 million and over at Homeland Security, 4,697 workers owe about $37 million. Active duty military members owe more than $100 million.

The Treasury Department, where Obama nominee Tim Geithner had to pay up $42,000 in his own back taxes before being confirmed as secretary, has 1,181 other employees with delinquent taxes totaling $9.3 million.

As usual, the Postal Service, with more than 600,000 workers, has the most offenders (25,640), who also owe the most -- almost $270 million. Veterans Affairs has 11,659 workers owing the IRS $151 million while the Energy Department that was so quick to dish out more than $500 million to the Solyndra folks has 322 employees owing $5 million.

The country's chief law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, has 2,069 employees who are nearly $17 million behind in taxes. Like Operation Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder has apparently missed them too.

As with ordinary people, the IRS attempts to negotiate back-tax payment plans with all delinquents, whose names cannot be released. But according to current federal law, the only federal employees who can be fired for not paying taxes are IRS workers.

From To Email Sent!You have successfully emailed the post. President Obama Mentions An Energy Company In His Big Speech And It Goes Bankrupt InstantlyMichael Brendan Dougherty

Andrew Restuccia of The Hill is reporting that Ener1, a battery company that President Obama referenced in his State of The Union Speech on Tuesday as an example of successful energy investments, has just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That's just two days after the speech.

“In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” Obama said in his speech.

According to Phil Milford and Dawn McCarty at Businessweek, Ener1 had received a $118 million U.S. Energy Department grant to make electric-car batteries. And the grant received bi-partisan support, so it is not entirely on Obama's shoulders. From Businessweek:

Under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, the Energy Department awarded grants in an attempt to create a U.S. electric-car industry. Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel was the grant recipient and has received about $55 million of its grant so far. A spokesman for the Energy Department, Jen Stutsman, said the department would provide comment soon.

In the 2010 State of the Union address, Obama mentioned Solyndra as another successful investment by the government in private-sector green-energy companies:

"You can see the results of last year's investments in clean energy. A North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries. Or in the California business, that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels,"

Solyndra, that California business, received a $535 million loan guarantee from the government before going bankrupt last September. Its top executives were enthusiastic Obama campaign donors. Solyndra had also spent nearly $1.8 million lobbying the government prior to receiving the loan guarantee.

It's obviously hugely embarrassing for the president to give another green-energy company a shout-out in his prime-time speech only to have it declare bankruptcy two days later.

The White House intends to boost government subsidies for wealthy buyers of the Chevy Volt and other new-technology vehicles — to $10,000 per buyer.

That mammoth subsidy would cost taxpayers $100 million each year if it is approved by Congress, presuming only 10,000 new-technology autos are sold each year.

But the administration wants to get 1 million new-tech autos on the road by 2015. The subsidy cost of that goal could reach $10 billion.

The planned giveaway will likely prompt populist protests from GOP legislators, but it will likely also will be welcomed by auto-industry workers in the critical swing state of Michigan.

That welcome is critical for President Barack Obama, who is touting his support for blue-collar manufacturing programs to help offset his low public approval ratings.

The new subsidy level represents a 33 percent jump from the current $7,500 government payout for each Volt buyer, even though the Volt’s buyers are already among the wealthiest Americans. It will be offered to buyers of any new-technology autos, including battery-powered autos and cars powered by natural gas, said a White House official.

The extra money for wealthy buyers will be borrowed funds, eventually paid off by future taxpayers in all income brackets.